Thirty years ago tonight, before the Detroit Pistons faced the Nuggets at McNichols Sports Arena, I was eating dinner in the press room. I was in my second year in the Nuggets beat after five seasons covering the NHL’s Colorado Rockies. This rarely happens today, but Detroit coach Chuck Daly was passing some of the pre-game time sitting in the press room, communing with the lowly members of the Fourth Estate and others.

Nuggets coach Doug Moe, as he often did, just poked his head through the doorway and smiled mischievously, checking out who was — and wasn’t — there. It was his way of saying hello.

Daly spotted him and called out, “First one to 140 wins.”

Moe laughed and responded, “We won’t even make it through the third quarter.”

Close enough.

The game lasted through three overtimes. I started and junked about twenty “ledes,” or the first few paragraphs of a story, before finally writing about the Pistons pulling out a 186–184 victory. Kiki Vandeweghe had a game-high 51 points, and Denver’s Alex English and the Pistons’ Isiah Thomas both had 47. The 370 points shattered the league record of 337, set in another triple-overtime game (San Antonio beat Milwaukee 171–166) in 1982.

This often is forgotten, but it was the last Nuggets game worked by strikebreaker referees before the regulars, who finally had settled with the league, went back to work. If the regular referees had worked it, regardless of what had happened, Moe might not have said what he said when it was over, mostly referring to a missed call near the end of the first overtime: “It was a great game, but we got (a bad deal).”

The funny thing was that one of the strikebreakers, Joe Borgia, ended up becoming a longtime NBA referee and later the league’s vice president for referee operations.